■ Ressenya] ENTREMONS. UPF JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY Universitat Pompeu Fabra ﺍBarcelona Número 2 (novembre 2011) www.upf.edu/entremons
Fred Spier Big History and the Future of Humanity Editorial: Wiley-Blackwell (Chichester) Any: 2010 Pàgines: 272 Preu: 80 €
Daniel PARSONS Fred Spier (born 1954) is a professor and researcher who currently teaches courses he helped design in the Big History at three universities in the Netherlands. He has an interdisciplinary background, with graduate degrees in Biochemistry, Cultural Anthropology and Social History. His books on the Big History have helped develop a small, but growing academic discipline. In this comparatively slim volume, Fred Spier ambitiously tackles a formidable problem – how to devise a theoretical approach to explain the overall structure of the history of our roughly 14 billion year-old universe. It is from this question the term the Big History orginates. To do so, he recognizes that we must adopt a “top-down” approach, one that also necessitates a degree of anthropocentrism. Spier’s conception of history encompasses and embraces the physical, natural and social sciences. The focus is on the driving factors of history and how these apply to all history: inanimate, animate, and cultural. This review, even slimmer than the book itself, can only hope to do justice to the main ideas of Spier’s argument and it intends to provoke an interest in the book itself. In Spier’s analysis of the universe, the central characteristic, and therefore the central preoccupation of the book, is the rise and demise of levels of complexity over time. Complexity, he notes, does not currently have a generally accepted definition, but he chooses variety of building blocks and sequence as the two defining characteristics, with
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the complexity per unit mass as the way to compare complexity between various regimes. The central tenet of the book is that complexity is dependent on energy flows and “Goldilocks” conditions – that is to say that usable energy needs to be available and that material conditions need to be permissive, rather than prohibitive, for complexity to arise and survive. Spier organizes the universe into regimes of three types: inanimate matter, animate matter and culture, and the book progresses along these lines, though with great amounts of cross-fertilization. Spier starts by systematically charting the progression of the physical universe from the big bang to star and planetary formation, stressing not only the Goldilocks conditions which allowed these events to occur, but how the results of this process have in turn provided the Goldilocks conditions for the occurrence of life in at least one planet in the universe. The next section of the book tackles the rise of a new type of complexity: forms of life. Life, in terms of mass, occupies an extremely small proportion of the overall universe, yet the complexity per unit mass of life is orders of magnitude greater than ordinary matter. The author insists that this is due to the fact that life, unlike inanimate matter, continuously needs to tap matter and energy in order to maintain itself. This implies that an efficient evolutionary strategy involves accruing more energy, though always within the boundaries of the Goldilocks conditions, than is necessary to survive and maintain complexity. This means that complexity does not come cheap. As complexity rises, greater amounts of energy are required and more entropy is formed. Hence complexity in itself is not necessarily a benefit, but rather a constant question of cost-benefit analysis. Advantages gained from more complexity, specifically the ability to access and usefully process new and greater energy flows, must outweigh the energy costs incurred in creating and maintaining the greater levels of complexity. The evolutionary formation of the brain, that great consumer of energy, and the rise of states serve as just two of Spier’s many examples of increased complexity, in this case biological and cultural, respectively, which have allowed for greater access to useful energy. That history is littered with examples of dead ends and failures for both these examples shows the risks involved in attempting to gain greater complexity. What this implies is that as human beings and the cultures they have devised require higher energy influxes, a premium should be placed on energy efficiency, and this is the closing of Spier’s argument. Our brains and culture, the information which we have accrued over time, have given us unprecedented access to energy and matter – Spier estimates that we control roughly 25-40 percent of biomass on the planet in spite of making up only .005 percent of this total. Our evolutionary tendency to use more than necessary, as mentioned above, should make us ponder if as a species we are pushing against the boundaries of the Goldilocks conditions for our survival. Given that the Second Law of Thermodynamics also implies that the history of the universe is also the history of
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increasing entropy and that the Earth disposes only a finite amount of useable energy to maintain complexity, Spier postulates some possible trajectories for the future of the human race, with a less than rosy outlook. With the issues that our species will face in the near future, Spier’s book and argument become ever more important and urgent. No book is faultless, of course. Given the enormous scope of the book and Spier’s intention to illustrate overarching patterns, the author’s reliance on repetition and phrases conveying uncertainty (e.g. “may have been”) can be forgiven. The author readily admits when studies on certain issues are lacking; these gaps in research, combined with the theory the author espouses, could provide research fodder and a theoretical framework for historians interested in the relationship between the natural sciences and history. Additionally, for the historiographer, more on the genealogy of the Big History compared to traditional historical accounts would be welcome, while the social historian and social scientists would be interested in how these different types of historiography can affect identity, a topic Spier briefly touches on. Economic historians would relish the chance to see more on how varying forms of complexity in economic organization relate to energy accruement and consumption. And the list goes on. That historians of all stripes would desire more, rather than less, from this book does not reflect a deficit in Spier’s work however, but rather it is a testament to the strength of Spier’s argument and ideas.
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